e-Clippings (Learning As Art)

"Sync Google Calendar with Outlook and more with WideLens" (Alex Barnett)

Man, I really WANT this.

Did You Know: 'knol' = a unit of knowledge?

Holy Defining Moments Batman!! Someone call NIST! Someone call Will Thalheimer!! Tell them that Google has now defined a 'knol' as a "unit of knowledge." Quick...someone write me a Web 4.0 dashboard widget that will instantaneously measure the KNOL output of all divisions in my organization. Can I start writing RFPs that require contractors to produce a course that will generate a certain number of KNOLs?

Actually it sounds like Google is starting up some author-focused/centric competitor to Wikipedia. This is the goal statement:

"The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors. Books have authors' names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors -- but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted. We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content. At the heart, a knol is just a web page; we use the word "knol" as the name of the project and as an instance of an article interchangeably. It is well-organized, nicely presented, and has a distinct look and feel, but it is still just a web page. Google will provide easy-to-use tools for writing, editing, and so on, and it will provide free hosting of the content. Writers only need to write; we'll do the rest."

Hmmm...sounds like an awful lot of trust there. Google does go on to say:

"We do not want to build a walled garden of content; we want to disseminate it as widely as possible. Google will not ask for any exclusivity on any of this content and will make that content available to any other search engine."

.....but still, right? Am I splitting hairs or is ther some significantly different about making a personal decision to trust a company like Google with my email and trusting that same commercial enterprise with what could grow to be a fairly significant sum of knowledge (millions of of KNOLs)? Or, should I just be happy that for whatever reasons, some company is willing to step up and take on this sort of project?

The Google Cheat Sheet

This is nifty...someone has taken the time to assemble a ton o' facts and figures related to the Big G on two handy sheets. It lists the calculator operators, the advanced search operators, all the official blog and tools and much more more!

Google Image Search as a Translation Tool

From Life Hacker comes this post about how you could use Google's Image Search to translate a word or a concept. This is really interesting in that if you start with say a foreign word you don't understand, you could translate it using an online translator but we've all seen the hysterical results those sometimes deliver. I wonder if though you may be able to get a clearer picture of the concept using images (no pun intended).

Google Trends...What Does It All Mean?

Just for fun. The image you see is from Google Trends.You can put in any two terms and the hit the button and Google graphs the number each is mentioned in recent search results. So I did a trend analysis of up vs. down. You could also do on vs. off (on is just destroying off by the way!).

Google Makes All Of Shakespeare Available

Don't you think it's just cool sometimes when Google does something like this? Just bing and there you go...all of the Bard's works, online and searchable (although I certainly hope it doesn't replace being forced to read speeches from Julius Caesar and Rome and Juliet aloud in front of your high school English classes).

You should also know that I am resisting hard the compulsion to turn this into a screed against those enemies of rational thought and the common good - if certain people had their way...lets just say that the Bard's work would still be locked up in copyright battles.

The Next Step in Google-based Learning:

We've all talked how Google is a great learninig/performance support tool - well now Google moves much closer to becoming part of the platform. Google has released the Google Search AJAX API (with the companion blog of course). I know, right, sounds thrilling huh? Well bear with me.

What it means is that a Google search can now be integrated in ways and to a degree that was never as easily possible before. The API is already being used in examples to allow users to integrate Google results into comments on blogs, to build lists of favorite places which are displayed on Google Maps, and  developers now have much more control over the styling and appearance of Google within their own apps.

What this really means is that if anybody is paying attention someone should start a clock to see how long it is until an e-learning content or authoring tool vendor begins to add in Google functionality into their tool sets or until the LMS/LCMS community starts to embrace the Google AJAX API as a new feature.

Google Desktop Plug-In - Document Maps

I know that Google's new spreadsheet is getting a lot of attention but I want to point out another little ditty - the GDS Document Map written by Vittorio Accomazzi is a plug-in/widget for Google Desktop 4.0 or higher. The image on the right shows the result you get when you use this nifty little tool. It visually groups the results of a document search so that related documents are closer together. It's cool but I'm wondering about grouping learning objects in a search - I'm a visual learner so this kind of search result depiction is appealing to me.

Listen to this from Google CEO Eric Schmidt

(Business 2.0 story)

Question: Does Google have some kind of grand strategic plan for the new products it creates?

Answer: Virtually everything new seems to come from the 20 percent of their time engineers here are expected to spend on side projects. They certainly don’t come out of the management team.

Let us ponder that for a moment. Let that sink in. Now read it again. Now think about our processes we have set up to come up with new products and ideas. Maybe we need to quit trying so hard and just people some free time to explore those things that they are passionate about and interested in and help them along that way.

Slate Piece Poses An Alternative Future For GoogleZon

(Link to Slate.com Article)

Over at Slate, Jack Shafer has written a piece supposing a future quite different that the one shown in this video. In Shafer's world, Rubert Murdoch somehow becomes savvy enough to create a global classified ad databse that crushes the profits of Google's AdSense and AdWords. He just goes a bit nuts.

I mean, while there are some elements to Shafer's story that could ring true,  the overall validity of the piece is really hurt by the inclusion of such flippant and hyperbolic turns like

"Google had also lost its "don't be evil" cachet ever since founders Sergey and Larry had purchased a Boeing 767-200 and crashed it into Coit Tower while doing barrel rolls over the San Francisco Bay. They survived, but their reputations and that of their company did not."

Then somehow- and I'm not quite sure how - Amazon kills iTunes and somehow Shafer totally glosses over or just ignores the hardware side of the equation there. Another piece of over-the-top writing is this little snippet that  "Regulators throttled its local Wi-Fi initiative." I mean know this is fiction but even so, you should support a statement like this somehow.

While I'm not saying that Google couldn't be beaten and that it might not involve some of the very players mentioned in this piece, Shafer's style, flippancy and layering of improbable turn after improbable turn make this piece seem more like a boxer flailing wildly at a target that he can't seem to hit as opposed to an industry expert delivering well-placed blows to an over-inflated opponent.